For years, we have been telling you that radio has not the medium that it used to be. On December 20, Citadel Broadcasting filed for bankruptcy - on October 30^th, the owner of 224 radio stations in the United States listed assets of $1.4 billion and debts of $2.46 billion. This should come as no surprise. We have talked about how young listeners have left radio by the millions...turning to their MP3s and iPods.

At one point, Citadel owned eight radio stations in Charleston, SC, they now own four. Citadel also owns five radio stations in Columbia, SC. Please note the formats of these nine stations: Charleston - Country, Top 40, Talk, Hip Hop; In Columbia - Talk, R&B, Sports, Oldies, and Adult Contemporary. Where's the Classic Rock,   Contemporary, Modern Rock, Progressive Rock, Pop, Soft Rock and Urban Contemporary formats that dominated the airwaves for years? Gone. Young people today, especially those that listened to the formats listed above have all of their favorite music on their iPods and have deserted radio. If you can't REACH enough people, you can't attract advertisers. If you can't REACH young people, you drop the format and advertisers go elsewhere and you may go out of business.

In recent court documents, Citadel CFO Randy Taylor cited a "chokehold" on ad sales as one reason for the bankruptcy. The company painted a gloomy picture of the radio industry, estimating that total revenue from U.S. ads in the United States will skid 19% this year to $14.1 billion. "Citadel, like many radio companies, has seen its revenue and profitability decline due to the downturn in advertising spending by companies particularly in the automotive, banking and restaurant sector", Taylor said.

The recession-induced sales slump was compounded by the company's crippling debt load. At the same time, some listeners have abandoned the so-called terrestrial radio format for pre-recorded music and the commercial-free satellite radio offerings of Sirius XM.

If your ad dollars are tied up in radio, or you are thinking about funneling your ad dollars in that direction, it's time to reevaluate. When that radio rep comes calling, make sure you see a current Arbitron rating book, not a two or three year average audience measurement, but ratings from the summer or fall of 2009, and pay close attention to the demographics. What's their age? What's the reach figure? Who are you really talking to?

We may be looking at the demise of many formats in the radio industry, and the death of most "music" radio.

When you are thinking about your goals and plans for 2010, and how to find new business, and how to increase revenue and profits, so that you can look for the new location, or hire three more employees, and buy a delivery truck - advertising and marketing should be among your first thoughts. How are you going to reach new customers? Radio is probably not the answer.......and NEITHER are the yellow pages... read the next article

According to Roy H. Williams, "Money spent in the Yellow Pages (and their associated websites) is basically wasted".

Within a seven day period this fall, we had three yellow books book dropped on the lawn by the mailbox (two were in a plastic wrapper, one was just dropped), all were carried into the garage and placed into the recycling bin.

At a meeting of local, county and state fairs managers (1600 of them), the speaker asked ""How many of you have used a search engine in the past seven days to research a purchase you were considering?" 1600 hands went up simultaneously. How many hands would go up if the question were "how many of you looked at the yellow pages in the last seven days to research a purchase you were contemplating?"

It has been almost 50 years since "Let your fingers do the walking" ads first ran, and now fingers are not walking but flying over keyboards and Qwertys.

Do yourself a favor and search online for your business. Look up your product or service...I'll tell you this, the search engine will not direct you to the online yellow page listings or ads for your company. Search engines elevate the most commonly clicked links. Since the yellow book or yellow page ads are not used often, Google and other search engines do not rank them very high. Here's the deal - yellow book and yellow page ads don't rank high on a search engine because most people never see those ads!

In three different cities this year, our television partners have received letters from advertising agencies defending their yellow page clients and trying to say that our workshops are misleading and are not truthful when it comes to the yellow page industry. There is not one statement, or number, or survey, or claim that we have made that is not researched thoroughly and we know is factual.

More and more businesses today have only the free listing in the yellow pages and are spending their money elsewhere. These businesses and service companies usually lead their markets in sales and service.